LIBRARY/TITANIC CD-ROM'S; The Titanic's Mystique in Digital Packages

By RICK ARCHBOLD

Published: April 8, 1999

WHY does the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912, still rank as the disaster to end all disasters? Worse calamities have come and gone while the Titanic continues to hold sway. James Cameron's ''Titanic'' was only the latest in a long line of movie treatments of the subject going back to ''Saved From the Titanic,'' released a mere month after the disaster and starring a Titanic survivor, Dorothy Gibson.

There have been so many books about the Titanic and the people who built her and sailed on her that even students of the subject have lost count. It has been said that the Titanic stands third in the English words-in-print sweepstakes, after the Bible and the Civil War.

Of course, the Titanic story gained currency with the discovery of the wreck on Sept. 1, 1985, by a joint French-American expedition led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel. Suddenly the famous ship was among us. If we couldn't touch her, we could see her, looking remarkably well, thank you very much, despite all those years away and all the inevitable decay.

But the story's enduring popularity cannot be explained away by the discovery of the wreck. The most common significance given to the Titanic is technological: that the disaster was an example of technology overreaching itself. Maybe that angle helps explain why the Titanic story should have such mass appeal as we near the new millennium. Like the late Edwardians, we have placed an enormous amount of faith in our ability to transcend nature. Our Titanic will not be a luxury liner but something quite different: a massive power blackout or some other failure of highly centralized energy- or communications-delivery systems. The current Year 2000 mania has roots in the same psychological soil as the fascination with the Titanic shipwreck.

I would argue that the real keys to the Titanic's staying power are related to when the sinking happened and how we heard about it. The disasters we remember, that become part of popular culture, all take place at a pregnant historical moment, usually as an era is coming to a close. The Titanic sank as the Edwardian age was drawing to a close. The Hindenburg, which probably ranks second in the modern disaster popularity contest, burned in 1937, just before the outbreak of World War II.

The other aspect of the technological importance of these disasters has to do with mass communication. Each of these 20th-century disasters represents a sort of communications first. The Titanic was the first major disaster that people learned about through the miracle of the wireless radio. (Before wireless, a ship could sink without anyone noticing until it failed to show up at its port of destination.) The Hindenburg was the first great catastrophe that people saw in moving pictures. But the Titanic is the first great disaster of the electronic age. And still the greatest.

Site-Seeing: Titanic Lore

Here are a few Titanic Web sites that feature more than just pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio:

ENCYCLOPEDIA TITANICA: www.rmplc.co.uk/eduweb/sites/phind -- This may be the most comprehensive Titanic site, with passenger lists, ship plans and video.

TITANIC: www.titanicmovie.com -- This official site for the film has some footage of dives to the wreck by James Cameron, the director.

GEORGE BEHE'S TITANIC TIDBITS: ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages /Carpathia -- Created by a past official of the Titanic Historical Society, this site covers obscure information like the music played by the ship's band.

TITANIC'S LOST SISTER: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/titanic -- A site on the Titanic's sister ship Britannic, which was sunk in November 1916.